Symmetry features

A collaboration of the Americas aims to take the first pioneering images of low-energy neutrinos and provide new data to shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter.

Hadrons count among their number the familiar protons and neutrons that make up our atoms, but they are much more than that.

The discovery of the muon originally confounded physicists. Today international experiments are using the previously perplexing particle to gain a new understanding of our world.

We know that neutrinos aren’t massless, they’re just incredibly light — a million times lighter than the next lightest particle, the electron. And they don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model.

A sourdough family started at Fermilab by a graduate student visiting from Texas A&M has continued to expand and flourish.

Physicist Cristiano Galbiati shifted focus from the search for dark matter to the shortage of ventilators for COVID-19 patients. The collaboration he began created an easy-to-manufacture ventilator in less than two months.

New results from the T2K experiment in Japan rule out with 99.7% confidence nearly half of the possible range of values that could indicate how neutrinos behave compared to their antimatter counterparts.

What if you want to capture an image of a process so fast that it looks blurry if the shutter is open for even a billionth of a second? This is the type of challenge scientists on experiments like CMS and ATLAS face as they study particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. An extremely fast new detector inside the CMS detector will allow physicists to get a sharper image of particle collisions.

There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make it in a lab? What kinds of particles is it made of? Is it made of more than one kind of particle? Is it even made of particles at all? Still, although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.

To some degree, scientists on all of today’s particle physics experiments share a common challenge: How can they pick out the evidence they are looking for from the overwhelming abundance of all the other stuff in the universe getting in their way? Physicists refer to that stuff — the unwelcome clamor of gamma rays, cosmic rays and radiation crowding particle detectors — as background. They deal with background in their experiments in two ways: by reducing it and by rejecting it.